Dirt
by Goldleaf83
Summary: Carter contemplates dirt while down in the tunnel.  Episode based.


Gee, I hate dirt.

Kinda funny, though. I didn't used to, not when I was a little kid.

I remember when my folks took us to see my mom's mom when I was just a little fella. That's what we called her, actually, Mom-Mom. Boy, she was great. She lived in Muncie, Indiana, which is a long way from where we lived in Bullfrog, North Dakota, so we only took the train to visit her a couple times that I can remember. And gosh, did she have an amazing garden! Every morning she'd go out with a watering can and water everything, all the flowers along the edge of the house, petunias and begonias and geraniums. She called them all her babies. Then she'd do the vegetables in the vegetable patch. I remember she raised tomatoes, corn, squash, cucumbers, and okra, probably other stuff too, with marigolds planted at the edges because she said they'd keep the pests off. So every morning we were there Mom-Mom would lug can after can of water to give all her vegetable babies a good drink. I'd trail along behind her, looking at all the worms and bugs that poked out of the dirt when the water splashed down. "Mind, don't you pick on the worms," she'd warn me. "They're what makes my vegetables grow!"

I wanted to plant some seeds, so she let me plant some beans. I watched the dirt every day to see if they'd come up, and got to see the shoots before we left. Mom-Mom promised me she'd let me know how they did, and she wrote me in a letter later that summer to tell me about how many beans she'd picked from them and how good they'd tasted when she'd cooked them.

She'd left a patch of the garden unplanted and she'd water it too, bring us another can of water, then me and my sister would spend hours making mudpies. I loved how the mud would squish through my fingers and toes, how we could mold it in shapes and dry them out and put water on them and mush 'em up again. Boy, I think we had more of the dirt on us than left in the garden by the end, but she didn't mind. She'd just strip us out of our rompers and wash 'em and hang 'em up in the sun to wear for more mudpies the next day. Dirt was good back then.

A couple years later we went back to Muncie, but Mom-Mom was dying. She seemed so little, all drawn up in the bed. At the funeral, the minister said she was returning to the ground she came from, dust to dust. I remember I didn't understand that. But when we went to the cemetery after the funeral, I couldn't believe they were actually going to put her in the dirt. I wondered if they were planting her like her seeds, and what she'd grow into. I asked my mom, and she said that didn't happen, but she started to cry so I didn't ask anymore. I didn't like dirt so much anymore after that, though.

Dirt got to be a real problem in my teens. The drought got our farm, turned all our fields to dust. Couldn't grow hardly anything. Then the wind storms came, took off all the dry topsoil. Could grow even less after that. Not even grass, so our cows had nothing to eat, and my dad wound up having to sell them off before they starved. And the dust went everywhere. I remember seeing our neighbor's house, the dust drifted up to the windows in August, like snow in January. Dust storms were just real bad. You couldn't see from our house out to the barn when one came along. And getting caught outside in one could kill you. Mr. Heald, a guy from our church, was out in his truck when a bad dust storm hit. The truck died from all the grit in it, so he got out and tried to find his way to a farm, I guess. He should've stayed in the truck. He got off the road and got lost in a field. By the time he finally found a farm house, he'd breathed in too much of the dirt. He got dust pneumonia, died from it just a few days later.

I just hated having grit in my mouth, all the time, every summer. It was bad outside, but you couldn't get away from it inside either. It leaked in around the windows, through any cracks, and every time we opened the door. My sister would set the table with the plates upside down and napkins over the silverware, so they wouldn't collect so much dust before we sat down to eat. Even the milk had dust in it. We'd joke that it was chocolate milk, but it didn't taste like chocolate. You shouldn't have to chew milk!

So the dirt was outside me, inside me. I breathed dust in and ate it. That line from my grandmother's funeral stuck in my mind: dust to dust. I was made of dust, and to dust I'd return, the minister said. Given the way things were going, I could believe it.

Everyone wanted to fix the dust bowl. The government told us to start planting trees as wind breaks, plant our wheat in strips with other crops between, and plant the rows against the prevailing wind pattern so's the wind couldn't scoop up the dirt so easily. Rains finally came in 1939, breaking the drought at last, and it got better. But I was so tired from years of dust. I wanted out of the dirt, so I left Bullfrog for Muncie, back where my mom's family still lived, got a job in my uncle's pharmacy. I liked it there a lot. Even met a girl, Mary Jane. But best of all, it was real good to be able to breathe without dirt in my nose at last.

Then the war came and I got drafted, of course. They sent me to basic training down in Mississippi. We sure spent a lot of time in the mud for training exercises. The mud wasn't fun like when I was a kid, either. And boy, my uniform wasn't as easy to get clean as Mom-Mom had managed with our rompers either. I sure wished over and over that we could've had some of that Mississippi rain back up in Bullfrog five and ten years earlier. I had a feeling that the infantry would mean a lot more slogging through mud and muck. When I got a chance to volunteer for the Air Corps, I jumped at it. I figured getting up in the air would finally get me out of the dirt!

And it did for a while. Till I got shot down. And now I'm here at Stalag 13 – where one of the main jobs for everyone is digging dirt. The colonel wants tunnels that go not just outside the wire but to all the main buildings in camp, so that's a lot of digging, for just about everyone. So I have dirt in my hair and eyes and nose and mouth all the time all over again.

I don't tell anyone how much I hate it. The digging's gotta be done, and I sure wouldn't want the colonel to think I don't want to pull my weight around here. We all dig, and he works as hard as any of us, taking his turn at the shovels. It got better once we finally had enough of the tunnels dug, and we started using them for our missions, to get out of camp and do sabotage and rescue downed fliers and so forth. We're a real underground unit, I guess you could say! But it sure means spending a lot of time down here in the tunnels, down in the dirt.

I've always tried hard not to worry about getting buried down here. We're real careful about shoring up the tunnels to make sure cave-ins don't happen, but they have a few times. Like now. But you can't expect tunnels to last real well when a bomb hits the compound. So I'm stuck in the radio room right now, waiting for the others to dig me out. I'm okay for right now, I keep telling myself. I've sent the code out to London on the radio, since Kinch is on the other side of the wall of dirt and can't do it himself. At least that kept me busy for a bit, while I've been waiting. Sure is a good thing Kinch taught us all Morse code, for emergencies. I know he's digging real hard to get to me, that Newkirk and LeBeau and all my buddies are. They've cleared enough dirt that they've been able to shout to me, tell me they're coming, and I told them I got the code sent off to London. It's just going to take them some time to move enough dirt to get to me so I can get out with them. That's all.

I'll be okay. I know that. But I'll still be glad to get back above ground. I don't think I'm a seed that grows real well down here in the dirt.

And I'm not ready to turn into dust myself just yet.

I'll be even gladder when the war ends. I figure I'll go back to Muncie and become a pharmacist. I'll miss all the guys here for sure, but boy I also know for sure that I'm gonna get out of the dirt once and for all.

_Author's Notes:_

_1. Set near the end of "A Klink, a Bomb, and a Short Fuse."_

_2. The Dust Bowl was one of the largest natural disasters on record, resulting from a catastrophic combination of almost decade-long drought (1931-39) and poor farming practices. The worst areas affected were in eastern Colorado, western Kansas, northwestern New Mexico, and the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, but the drought and the Dust Bowl affected northern Great Plains states too: eastern Montana and Wyoming, both the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Minnesota, even up into the Canadian prairies. Dust from the storms was carried thousands of miles, falling on New York City, Washington, D.C., and as far as 400 miles out in the Atlantic. The dust storms killed people, the way Carter's neighbor died. You can find a lot of good sites on the web that can give you more history on the Dust Bowl, if you're interested. The bit about the dinner plates came from my great aunt, who lived in eastern Colorado in the mid-1930s, right in the middle of the Dust Bowl. For a good series of (truly terrifying) pictures of the 1930s dust storms, see www[dot]weru[dot]ksu[dot]edu[slash]new_weru[slash]multimedia[slash]dustbowl[slash]dustbowlpics[dot]html. If you really want to feel what it was like to live through it, Karen Hesse's Newbery-winning novel, Out of the Dust, is an achingly beautiful, well-researched and well-told story._


End file.
